It's with extreme trepidation that I embark, I can tell you. I've long resisted any temptation I might have had to add even more to the babble of online discourse.

So why have I started this blog? Well, part of it is that I'm entering a phase shift in my life. At the end of April, I get made redundant from the full-time day job that has sustained me for the past eight years. At my age, that means effectively saying goodbye to the world of permanent employment, which is quite scary. At the same time, I'm pretty excited about it. My severance package will fund an extended sabbatical, during which I will be free to get back to extended writing, not to mention musical activities. More of that in another posting.

And I will also be able to devote more attention to Reality Street, which is very timely, because I sense the press is now (after 15 years in business, actually) beginning to get some serious attention. In the past year, in particular, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, edited by Jeff Hilson, and Paul Griffiths' Oulipian novella let me tell you have been "noticed" in places our books have never been noticed before. Now the new website of which this blog forms part is up and running, I hope that this attention will increase. (While I remember - please take a look, and buy books too! there's a proper online shop now.)

The software that makes this blog possible encourages me to slot my postings into categories and give them tags. I'm going to leave that bit blank for now, because I want to allow some open-endedness right at the outset. I'm used to writing every day, but only in my private journal. Being on show to the world, even that tiny sub-set of it that finds its way to this space, is somewhat different. I have little doubt that I'll be writing about writing: my own, the writing of others that I publish, and writing that I currently admire. And music too. And Hastings, where I live. And a whole lot of other stuff.